In this article
Publish prices if you compete on availability and service and your net rates are defensible. Keep them gated if your margin varies materially by customer or your brand agreements restrict display. Most Indian electrical distributors should publish a list price with a visible “sign in for your net rate” — it captures the search traffic without exposing the slab structure.
We had to make this call for our own catalogue before we could launch anything, and the argument inside the firm took longer than the implementation did.
The three models
| Model | What you gain | What you lose | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully public | Search visibility, buyer trust, fewer time-wasting enquiries | Slab structure exposed; every customer sees the same number | Dealers competing on stock and service, with a flat or near-flat rate structure |
| List price public, net rate gated | Indexable content, a price anchor, rate structure protected | An extra step before the buyer sees his real number | Most distributors, most of the time |
| Fully gated / enquiry only | Complete control; every rate negotiated in context | Search invisibility; you never hear from the buyer who wanted a number at 11pm | Project-led businesses where every order is genuinely bespoke |
The models are not moral positions. They are different answers to one question: how much does your price vary between customers for the same item in the same quantity?
If the answer is “barely”, publish. If the answer is “a lot, and for good reasons”, gate the net rate. If the answer is “every deal is different”, you are probably not in the catalogue business at all and should be honest about that.
What publishing actually costs you
The objection every distributor raises first is the competitor, and it is the weaker of the two objections.
Your competitor can already find your price. He sends somebody to ask for a quotation, exactly the way you do to him. This has been true since long before anyone in this trade had a website, and a dealer who believes his rates are secret has simply not been tested recently.
The real cost is internal. The moment a rate is public, every customer on a worse rate can see it.
That conversation is survivable and the honest ones go fine — most buyers understand that a customer lifting forty pieces a month prices differently from one lifting four. But you will have that conversation several times in the first quarter, and you should decide in advance what you are going to say. “Our published rate is the standard rate; your rate reflects your volume and your terms” is a defensible position if it is true. If it is not true — if the difference is really about who negotiated harder in 2019 — publishing will surface that, and you will have to fix it.
Which is, quietly, an argument for publishing. A rate structure that cannot survive being seen is a rate structure that was going to cause trouble eventually.
What gating costs you
Invisibility, mostly, and it is a cost you never see because it arrives as an absence.
A buyer searching a specific part number at eleven at night is not going to fill in an enquiry form and wait until Monday. He will find the dealer whose page shows a number. You do not get an enquiry you can convert. You get nothing, and you never learn it happened.
The second cost is the quality of the enquiries you do get. A fully gated catalogue attracts price-fishing — people who want a number and will not tell you what they are building. A page carrying a list price filters those out before they reach you, because the ones who only wanted an anchor already have it.
The third is slower and worse. Search engines and AI assistants both prefer pages with concrete, extractable information. A catalogue with no numbers is a catalogue that does not get cited when somebody asks what a part costs in India, and that gap compounds over years.
What brand agreements actually say
Worth checking rather than assuming, because dealers on both sides of this are usually working from memory.
Some manufacturer agreements restrict advertised pricing, particularly for discount display. Some restrict online sale of particular ranges. Many say nothing at all about the internet because they were drafted before it mattered. And some explicitly permit list-price display while restricting net-rate display — which is exactly the hybrid model, arrived at independently by people who had thought about it.
Read your own agreements before you decide, and if the language is ambiguous, ask your principal rather than interpreting in the direction you prefer. A manufacturer who finds out from a competitor’s complaint is in a worse mood than one you consulted.
The hybrid, and how to do it properly
The middle model works only if it is implemented honestly. Done badly it is worse than either extreme.
Show a real list price. Not an inflated number designed to make the gated rate look generous. Buyers in this trade know list prices and they will recognise a fictional one instantly, and the recognition costs you more than the transparency would have.
Make the gate cheap to pass. If seeing a net rate requires a sales call, a verification wait and three follow-ups, the gate is a wall and you are effectively in the fully-gated model with extra steps.
Say what is behind the gate. “Sign in to see your net rate” tells a buyer something useful. “Sign in for pricing” tells him nothing and reads like a lead-capture trap, which it usually is.
Keep the list price current. A published list price from two revisions ago is worse than no list price, because it is a concrete wrong number rather than an absence.
What changes after you publish
Three things, in our experience and in the experience of dealers we have talked to.
Your enquiry volume changes shape rather than size. Fewer “what is your best rate on this” messages, more enquiries that already name a quantity and a delivery location. That is a better mix even if the raw count drops.
Your sales team’s job changes. They stop being the source of the number and start being the source of everything around it — stock, delivery, alternatives, terms. Some salespeople find this liberating and some find it threatening, and it is worth talking to them before you flip the switch rather than after.
And your slowest-moving lines become visible in a way they were not before. When a rate is public, you find out quickly which of your stock is priced where the market actually is. That is uncomfortable information and it is worth having.
What we chose
We publish product pages with specifications and make rate visibility part of the account flow, and the argument that settled it internally was not about competitors at all. It was that a catalogue with no numbers is not a catalogue — it is an advertisement, and we already had one of those.
⟨Add here: one measurable thing that changed after you made the call. Enquiry volume, enquiry quality, a competitor’s reaction, or a customer conversation you had to have. One concrete observation converts this section from a position into experience.⟩
How to decide, in four questions
Does your rate for the same item and quantity vary by more than a few per cent between customers? If yes, gate the net rate.
Do your brand agreements restrict price display? Check, do not assume.
Do you compete on stock and service, or on rate? Stock and service survives transparency comfortably. Competing purely on rate does not, in either direction.
Would you be comfortable if your three biggest customers saw each other’s rates? If the honest answer is no, publishing will force a conversation you have been deferring — and that conversation is coming anyway, because price information leaks in this market faster than anybody admits.
Related reading: How to sell electrical products online in India · Why dealers lose deals after the quotation · How to read a switchgear quotation
All insights